Popular Articles

Doctors, Apologies, And The Law: An Analysis And Critique Of Apology Laws, Marlynn Wei

Student Scholarship Papers

This article analyzes and critiques apology laws, their potential use, and effectiveness, both legally and ethically, in light of the strong professional norms that shape physicians’ reaction to medical errors. Physicians are largely reluctant to disclose medical errors to patients, patients’ families, and even other physicians. Some states have passed so-called apology laws in order to encourage physicians to disclose medical errors to patients. Apology laws allow defendants to exclude statements of sympathy made after accidents from evidence in a liability lawsuit. This piece examines potential barriers to physicians’ disclosure of medical mistakes and demonstrates how the underlying problem may ...

Western Journal of Legal Studies

Lawyers are frequent and consistent “winners” of undesirable honorifics such as “most depressed workers.” However, the undercurrent of unhappiness should not be ignored or hidden away by jokes told by lawyers about lawyers. In this article, the author proposes that depression is an institutional, workplace and professionalism problem in law. In Part II of the paper, the author analyzes professional codes of conduct as they relate to depression. Part III is devoted to the science of depression. Part IV examines the role of the institution, in particular law schools, to creating and reinforcing an environment that exposes individuals to developing ...

Gaining Compliance Through Non-Verbal Communication , Pamela Peters

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

This article will examine the often de-emphasized and overlooked nonverbal aspects of communication. Understanding the impact of non-verbal messages sharpens one's ability to view seemingly superficial mannerisms and movements as potential cues. Further, this article is designed to prompt individual assessment and increase awareness of one's personal non-verbal mannerisms. This article is intended to encourage members of the ADR and legal communities to thoughtfully observe those around them and implement purposeful movements into their interactions, ultimately becoming more powerful and effective communicators and professionals. This article will consider two methods of gaining compliance through non-verbal signals. The first ...

The Andrea Yates Case: Insanity On Trial, Phillip J. Resnick

Cleveland State Law Review

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates drowned each of her five children in her bathtub. The nation struggled to understand how a loving mother could systematically kill her children in apparent cold blood. No crime evokes more intense feelings than a mother killing her own children. There was extraordinary media coverage of her trial in Houston, Texas in 2002. Her defense attorneys, George Parnham and Wendell Odom entered a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) to multiple counts of first degree murder with death penalty specifications. The 2002 trial jury verdict of guilty was overturned on appeal ...

Psychological Research On Children As Witnesses: Practical Implications For Forensic Interviews And Courtroom Testimony, John E.B. Myers, Karen J. Saywitz, Gail S. Goodman

Scholarly Articles

Hardening Of The Attitudes: Americans' Views On The Death Penalty, Samuel R. Gross, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

American support for the death penalty has steadily increased since 1966, when opponents outnumbered supporters, and now in the mid-1990s is at a near record high. Research over the last 20 years has tended to confirm the hypothesis that most people’s death penalty attitudes (pro or con) are based on emotion rather than information or rational argument. People feel strongly about the death penalty, know little about it, and feel no need to know more. Factual information (e.g., about deterrence and discrimination) is generally irrelevant to people’s attitudes, and they are aware that this is so. Support ...

Solitary Confinement, Public Safety, And Recdivism, Shira E. Gordon

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

As of 2005, about 80,000 prisoners were housed in solitary confinement in jails and in state and federal prisons in the United States. Prisoners in solitary confinement are generally housed in a cell for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day with little human contact or interaction. The number of prisoners held in solitary confinement increased 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, in comparison to the growth in the total prison population of 28 percent. Concurrently, the duration of time that prisoners spend in solitary confinement also increased: nationally, most prisoners in solitary confinement spend more than five years there ...

The Behavioral Economics Of Mergers And Acquisitions, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The world of mergers and acquisitions seems like a setting in which rationality necessarily dominates. There are high stakes, focused and sustained attention, and expert advisers who are repeat players. In the economics and management literature, however, there has been a great deal of research on what might be called “behavioral M&A”—using insights from psychology to explain observed patterns of behavior in the acquisitions marketplace. To date, the law has largely been uninterested in the psychological dynamics of corporate acquisitions. This essay looks at recent research on such issues as the role of overconfidence, hubris, anchoring, etc. in ...

William & Mary Law Review

University Policy And Procedural Responses To Students At Risk Of Suicide, Marlynn Wei

Student Scholarship Papers

Colleges and universities have recently faced several lawsuits brought by parents of students who have committed suicide or made suicide attempts. The lawsuits are based on varying claims, including negligence, breach of contact, and discrimination. In crafting policies to respond to these lawsuits, universities should not simply seek limiting institutional liability but should balance the private interest of their students, the relationship of the school to parents of the students, requirements of due process, and their commitment to antidiscrimination principles. This paper focuses on the current procedural protections in university policies handling students at risk of suicide. I argue that ...

The Failure Of The Federal Courts To Incorporate O'Connor's Dangerousness Requirement Into The Standards Utilized In Actions Challenging Wrongful Civil Comments, Svetlana Walker

Touro Law Review

Culture, Cognition, And Climate, Robert R.M. Verchick

Robert R.M. Verchick

Climate change is not only the mother of all market failures, it is a deep cognitive puzzle. Despite the scientific consensus, Americans remain divided over the existence of climate change and its link to human activity. Social science offers competing explanations for this phenomenon. One view says people lack good information. Another view claims people get sidetracked by “cognitive biases.” But a more recent, and more persuasive view, posits that a person’s attitude about climate change is not a risk assessment at all, but rather an expression of cultural values. This view, associated with the theory of “cultural cognition ...

Theodore Y. Blumoff

Since 2003, death penalty jurisdictions have been permitted to use psychotropic drugs to “restore” the competency of schizophrenics so they can execute them. Exactly why it is permissible to execute a “synthetically” or “artificially” competent individual is unclear in light of Ford v. Wainwright, a 1986 decision in which the United States Supreme Court, following ancient custom and common law rule, held that the cruel and unusual prohibition of the Eighth Amendment prohibited execution of the insane. The lack of clarity follows from the inability of the Court to agree on the reason the tradition persists. Nonetheless, health care providers ...

Trends In The Efficacy Of Parental Alienation Allegations In Child Custody Cases And Their Implications For Tortious Action, Bruce L. Beverly

Bruce L. Beverly

As the second of a series, this paper attempts to further explore the phenomenon of parental alienation in domestic relations cases by exploring the often frustrating position that many courts take with regard to blatant and obvious violations of the fundamental rights of parents to raise and know their children. Ofttimes, where courts have found the most blatant interference and harmful manipulation by one parent of the other parent's formerly close relationship with a child, the court either forces a detrimentally aligned child into the custody of the wrongfully vilified parent, thereby harming possible the child and that injured ...

barbara p billauer esq

Abstract:

The Daubert mantra demands that judges, acting as gatekeepers, prevent para, pseudo or bad science from infiltrating the courtroom. To do so, the Judges must first determine what is ‘science’ and what is ‘good science.’

It is submitted that Daubert is deeply polluted with the notions of Karl Popper who sets ‘falsifiability’ and ‘falsification’ as the demarcation line for that determination. This philosophy has intractably infected case law, leading to bad decisions immortalized as stare decisis, and an unworkable system of decision-making, which negatively impacts litigant expectations. Among other problems is the intolerance of Popper’s system for multiple ...

Excuses In Exile, Anders Kaye

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Suppose that I have intentionally killed another person and that I have done so without any justification. At first glance, it appears that I am guilty of murder, a very serious crime. Since I am guilty of this very serious crime, the state may inflict a very serious punishment on me—at least many years in prison, if not my whole life or the death penalty. But suppose that one of the following is also true in my case: (A) At the time that I killed my victim, I suffered from a mental disease and, as a result, lacked the ...

Jayme M Reisler

The high rate of comorbid substance use disorder and other mental illness (“dual diagnosis”) poses an enormous obstacle to public policy and sentencing in criminal cases. It is estimated that almost half of all Federal, State, and jail inmates suffer from dual diagnosis – a significantly higher prevalence than in the general population. Yet such inmates lack access to proper and effective treatments for their conditions. Several etiological theories have been put forth to explain the occurrence of dual diagnosis in general. However, virtually no studies have explored possible etiological reasons for the higher prevalence of dual diagnosis specifically in criminal ...

Todd E. Pettys

In a recent, widely publicized study, a prestigious team of political scientists concluded that there is strong evidence of ideological in-group bias among the Supreme Court’s members in First Amendment free-expression cases, with the current four most conservative justices being the Roberts Court’s worst offenders. Beneath the surface of the authors’ conclusions, however, one finds a surprisingly sizable combination of coding errors, superficial case readings, and questionable judgments about litigants’ ideological affiliations. Many of those problems likely flow either from shortcomings that reportedly afflict the Supreme Court Database (the data set that nearly always provides the starting point ...

Would The Implementation Of The Un Crpd Help The Disabilities Enjoy Fair Human Rights In The Us?, Ashley H. Song Ms.

Hyein Ashley Song Ms.

Modern discrimination is implicit. The paper finds out the implicit discrimination which comes from the mindset. So called, the ‘cognitive discrimination’ excludes the explicit discrimination prohibited by the legal language of the anti-discrimination law in the US. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) Article 12 states the fair recognition of disabilities. The paper tests if the UN CRPD can extend its meaning of fair recognition to reduce the hidden prejudice.

All Together Now: Using Principles Of Group Dynamics To Train Better Jurors, Sara G. Gordon

Scholarly Works

We ask juries to make important decisions that have a profound impact on people’s lives. We leave these decisions in the hands of groups of laypeople because we hope that the diverse range of experiences and knowledge in the group will lead to more thoughtful and informed decisionmaking. Studies suggest that diverse groups of jurors have different perspectives on evidence, engage in more thorough debate, and more closely evaluate facts. At the same time, there are a variety of problems associated with group decisionmaking, from the loss of individual motivation in group settings, to the vulnerability of groups to ...

The Danger Zone: How The Dangerousness Standard In Civil Commitment Proceedings Harms People With Serious Mental Illness, Sara G. Gordon

Scholarly Works

Almost every American state allows civil commitment upon a finding that a person, as a result of mental illness, is gravely disabled and unable to meet their basic needs for food and shelter. Yet in spite these statutes, most psychiatrists and courts will not commit an individual until they are found to pose a danger to themselves or others. All people have certain rights to be free from unwanted medical treatment, but for people with serious mental illness, those civil liberties are an abstraction, safeguarded for them by a system that is not otherwise ensuring access to shelter and basic ...

Susan Daicoff

Professional identity formation as a learning objective in law school may appear to be nontraditional and perhaps even innovative. While perhaps not a new concept, it is not typically an explicit goal of legal education. Empirical data finds that law school has demonstrable effects upon law students’ professional development; it also finds that certain nontraditional skills and competencies (or “soft skills”) make lawyers most effective. This article argues for explicit planning for and inclusion of professional identity development, including training in these nontraditional skills, in legal education. Professional identity encompasses one’s values, preferences, passions, intrinsic satisfactions, emotional intelligence, as ...

Scientizing Culpability: The Implications Of Hall V. Florida And The Possibility Of A “Scientific Stare Decisis”, Christopher Slobogin

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hall v. Florida held that “clinical definitions” control the meaning of intellectual disability in the death penalty context. In other words, Hall “scientized” the definition of a legal concept. This Article discusses the implications of this unprecedented move. It also introduces the idea of scientific stare decisis—a requirement that groups that are scientifically alike be treated similarly for culpability purposes—as a means of implementing the scientization process.

The True Legacy Of Atkins And Roper: The Unreliability Principle, Mentally Ill Defendants, And The Death Penalty’S Unraveling, Scott E. Sundby

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

In striking down the death penalty for intellectually disabled and juvenile defendants, Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons have been understandably heralded as important holdings under the Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence that has found the death penalty “disproportional” for certain types of defendants and crimes. This Article argues, however, that the cases have a far more revolutionary reach than their conventional understanding. In both cases the Court went one step beyond its usual two-step analysis of assessing whether imposing the death penalty violated “evolving standards of decency.” This extra step looked at why even though intellectual disability and ...

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

A Different Kind Of Justice: Review 2, Claudia Taranto

RadioDoc Review

A Different Kind of Justice tells the story of two people who met across a table in a restorative justice (RJ) conference, facilitated by Karl James, an RJ professional. Margaret’s home is robbed; Ian, a burglar and heroin addict, took a few small items, including a laptop with all her family photos. Margaret reveals that her daughter Jessica died in a car accident a few months after the burglary and the missing photos now mean so much more to the family.

The program is essentially interviews with the two characters, intercut, as they each tell their version of their ...